Illinois lawmakers have want to end inmates' co-payments of $5 for each prison doctor visit -- the equivalent of a month's wages in the prison's $0.05/hour and under workshops; in Oregon, they're contemplating creating a $3-5/visit co-pay.
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When I read Macon County, IL K-9 trainer Chad Larner's claim that marijuana legalization would necessitate euthanizing 275 Illinois drug-sniffer dogs that couldn't be retrained and who would be driven mad by the pervasive smell of legal weed, I thought, "Gosh, I hope some cops from a legal weed state like Colorado show up to explain that this guy is full of shit."
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Adams County Coroner James Keller is western Illinois has a great way to self-fund his department: if a poor person dies and their family can't afford the $1,000 for cremation, Keller just dumps the ashes in an unmarked mass grave; and then if the family needs a death certificate to access their dead loved one's estate, Keller makes them sign over the first $1,000 out of the estate to his office before he'll hand over the paperwork.
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Illinois is one of 18 states where Right to Repair legislation has been introduced -- rules that would force manufacturers to end the practice of undermining the independent repair sector with hidden service documents, unavailable parts, and DRM.
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In the USA, there are tens of thousands of teachers in open rebellion, in Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, Kentucky, and things are heating up in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa and Colorado.
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Four Democratic challengers backed by United Working Families (linked with the progressive Working Families Party) have successfully challenged establishment Dems backed by Chicago's legendarily unassailable "Democratic machine," effectively winning their offices at the same time, because the Democrat candidate always gets elected to those offices, thanks to Republicans not bothering to field candidates (leaving a vacuum that is sometimes filled by Holocaust-denying Illinois Nazis).
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Michael Madigan has served as chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party for 20 years (prior to that, he was Speaker of the Illinois House for decades); if you donated to the party in Illinois, Mr Madigan used your money to fund mailers that smeared progressive Democratic hopefuls as being secret Tea Party members, Donald Trump supporters and opponents of universal health care.
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Arthur Jones is standing uncontested to be the GOP's candidate in Illinois's 3rd Congressional District, representing suburban Chicago; he has run for office several times on a white-supremacist, Holocaust denial platform, calling the Holocaust "the biggest blackest lie in history."
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Rep Dan Lipinski (@RepLipinski) is Congressman for Illinois's 3rd congressional district; he voted against marriage equality and opposes abortion and and the $15 minimum wage. He is up for re-election next November.
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On December 15, Ars Technica ran a story by veteran security reporter Dan Goodin in which Goodin reported on a disclosure by Google researcher Tavis Ormandy, who had discovered that Keeper Security's password manager, bundled with Windows 10, was vulnerable to a password stealing bug that was very similar to a bug that had been published more than a year before.
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If Chicago Alderman Ameya Pawar is successful in winning the Democratic Party nomination to stand for governor of Illinois and then wins the election, he will: 1) commute all low-level drug offenders' sentences and free them from jail; 2) take educational oversight power from Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel and give it to the Chicago School Board; 3) fund schools out of a fairly distributed state pools, ending the system of funding based on local taxes, which disadvantages schools in poor neighborhoods; and 4) make access to paid sick leave and child care universal in the state of Illinois. Read the rest

M. David Weisman, a magistrate judge in Illinois's Eastern Division, denied a federal warrant application that would have allowed law enforcement officers to force suspects to unlock their mobile devices with a fingerprint, ruling that the suspects' Fourth Amendment (undue search and seizure) and Fifth Amendment (self-incrimination) rights protected them from being forced to unlock their devices. Read the rest

In Illinois, the prison authorities use a combination of mandatory financial disclosures and intelligence gleaned from opening prisoners' mail and sue anyone who might have any money for rent on their cells and the cost of their prison food. Read the rest